will the texas primary stop the #bern?

The Obama strategy in 2008 had a plan A and a plan B. Plan A was to knock out Hillary with big victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. Didn’t work. Plan B was to pad the delegate lead by exploiting small state caucuses and minimizing the damage in Hillary friendly places like New York. That worked, especially since the Hillary campaign was simply incompetent.

You will notice that Bernie has at least three easy states: Vermont, Massachusetts, and probably Minnesota. Then, it gets really hard, really fast. This is not because Hillary will magically become a great campaigner, but the fundamentals favor Hillary.

There are two reasons. First, you win Southern states in the Democratic primary by doing well among Black voters. South Carolina (Feb 27) will be the first test of how well Bernie can move these voters. If he comes up short in South Carolina, it’s bad news because you have more Southern states coming up real fast such as Alabama and Georgia on Super Tuesday and other Southern states soon after that. Second, in March, you will see the types of big states that Hillary dominated in 2008 because of superior name recognition, such as Texas (51% for HRC in 2008), New York (57%), California (51%), Ohio (53%), and Pennsylvania (54%).

Is it impossible for Bernie to win the nomination? Of course not, but he needs to really dominate outside of the establishment friendly mega-states like Ohio and California. That means an immediate and massive turn around in the Black vote, a wipe out in the caucus states, and some strategy for containing the losses from the big states, which even challenged Obama. That sounds really hard to me.

4 Responses

A late January poll had Hillary holding a 34 point lead in Minnesota. Seems likely that has or will come down. And also it is a caucus state, probably to Sanders’ advantage. But no indication yet MN will be easy for him.

Do we have any inkling how the 750-800 Democrat superdelegates will behave upon entry into the convention? That number could be larger than the difference between pledged delegates for the two candidates.